Art

It’s a life-long fantasy of mine — and maybe this is true of many creative people — to find a group of like-minded artists that could I band together with to form an experimental collective, living solely for our art. The Rude Mech’s Method Gun explores the dynamics of one such group through the story of five intensely devoted actors who join forces under the tutelage of their fiery mentor, Stella Burden. Burden is purportedly drawn from an obscure acting guru who taught in the 1960s and ’70s. However, she could also be the fictionalized dark side of renown method acting instructor Stella Adler. The ambiguity surrounding Burden’s origins reflects the production’s persistent blurring of life and stage.

Stella Burden pushes her students via an unorthodox doctrine she calls “The Approach,” where even minor roles become fraught with tension and rehearsals go on for years. The Method Gun examines what happens after Burden abandons her pupils. In her absence, her students grapple on through the final months of their nine-years-in-the-making production of A Street Car Named Desire. They continue looking to Burden as a Christ-like figure while they move forward with rehearsing the exercises she imparted, such as lining up for crying practice while struggling to contain their nagging inner turmoil. Burden’s students perpetually question the value of their work and mourn their inability to return to normal lives. They struggle with the complicated feelings they have for each other and the pressured disappointments they feel in their careers.

The performance’s sharp emotions and biting regrets are relieved through hypnotic timing and fanciful amusement. One character suddenly reveals himself as a captivating dancer while tangling up in a roll of tape. In another sequence, a balloon surprise makes for a delightfully transcendent moment.

At its core, The Method Gun provokes a personal reflection of one’s own mentors and the value and or costs of their influence on our lives.

Rude Mechs – The Method Gun
Friday, September 9th, 2011, 8:30pm to 10pm
Saturday, September 10th, 2011, 8:30pm to 10pm
Sunday, September 11th, 2011, 8:30pm to 10pm
Monday, September 12th, 2011, 6:30pm to 8pm
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011, 6:30pm to 8pm
@ Imago Theatre (17 SE 8th Ave., Portland, OR 97214)
$20 Members / $25 General / All Ages

There were no bouncy castles to be found where I grew up, so I’ve been waiting all my life to finally get in on some inflatable jump room action. Naturally, when I arrived at the launch of TBA’s 2011 festival at Washington High School, I beelined to get to the head of the queue for Oscar’s Delirium Tremens, TBA’s humongous inflatable forced-air elephant, (and a likely mascot for this year’s festival.) Oscar was developed by Patrick J. Rock of Rocksbox Fine Art in North Portland. On TBA’s site, Oscar is described as evoking “all the ecstasy, absurdity, and ensuing nausea in the life of a modern artist.” I was one of the first to slide through Oscar’s clever anus hatch, into the vast interactive bounce chamber of his belly. It’s hard not to get carried away while encapsulated in a vibrant pink jump dome, so I bounced up and down until I was as nauseous and dizzy as a recent art school graduate opening their first statement from Sallie Mae.

Once my stomach chilled, and after a scare caused by the fake feet under one of the stalls in the unisex bathroom, I was ready to explore ON SIGHT Visual Art. In room 102, artist Michel Groisman organized playing cards that have images of different body parts. Players sat in circles and helped make each other into momentary body sculptures. Groisman’s piece illustrates one of the festival’s core strengths: its ability to induce interaction with both the art the participants.

I was captivated by Claire Fontaine’s matchstick map of the United States in room 204, made out of over 10,000 matchsticks. In addition to being a sculptural marvel, there’s an undeniable and provoking tension in its fragility as a symbol for the impending complications of our country’s future. Then there’s also the inherent suspense of standing next to something with the perceived potential to burst in flames at any moment. Rumor has it that the original plan was to light the map on fire. Ambiguity about the final incarnation of the map is adding to its mystique.

In room 202, Kate Gilmore’s Sudden As A Massacre involves a video loop of five woman, all in identical floral dress, dismantling an enormous five thousand pound cube of wet clay. The performance occurred one month ago in the same room where the work is now being shown, so visitors are also able to peruse the physical evidence of the performance. You can see marks on the wall where they flung the debris while they toiled, along with their white strappy sandals, now ensconced within the hardened clay. It’s clear that this was a grueling endeavor. No matter at which point you arrive in the video loop, the ladies perpetually grow evermore exhausted as they claw, fling, moan and pant, up until the anticlimactic ending.

The opening’s festivities concluded with a high octane performance by Portland’s Bounce music favorite Beyondadoubt. Once her aggressive booty originals got rolling, the crowd went crazy. A gorgeous hard-bodied gentleman took the stage and went to work on a rhinestone covered chair, wearing an elaborate feathered headdress and assless chaps. The music throbbed and swelled, and everybody bumped to the auditory jolts. By the time the show concluded, diverse booties of all sizes and genders were twerking all over the place.

“… As a person, I just really love to dig and dig and dig… I like it when there’s a whole series of layers underneath.”

“I [would] just always go to thrift stores and just see these beautiful, beautiful blankets and stuff that were like two bucks… Now, the aesthetic has come into fashion, so it’s kind of like, of course people see that stuff and like it – but when I was collecting it, nobody liked it; it was just crap.”

“Handwork is not something that needs to be inherently feminine, and I like that idea.”

In this video, João Ruas and Andrew Hem draw from their rich cultural backgrounds to create a painting that seems to group together three widely different individuals with varying cores.

Song: Working For A Nuclear Free City – “Black Rivers”

Australian artist Rena Littleson‘s latest self-portrait series puts her in situations and postures occupied by the self-conscious, the martyred, the shamed, the belligerent, and the confused. It’s not stated overtly whether these images are actually a reflection of her mind-state at any given time or not, but the drawings, though excellently rendered and realistically grey-scaled, hint towards some enticing darkness embedded within her character (which sometimes manifests through a love for Justin Beiber?). Possibly.

More can be seen on her website.

For the seventh installment of Scion’s Art Tour, Matt Goldman — former Senior Art Director for Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One — has put together a hilariously brilliant video that takes wacky inflatable arm men (that look like ice pops) and sets them to Spanish language dance jams in a way that gives actual personalities to each vocal segment of the song.

About the video, Goldman states:

“Air Dancers was conceived on the first day of a college 3D animation course I would eventually drop a week later. At the time, I was also enrolled in a video class and both were such a heavy load that they couldn’t possibly taken simultaneously. Forced to choose, I shelved the 3D class and Air Dancers with it only to bring it back 8 years later, predictably, as a live-action video. Both parodying and critiquing a (somewhat) bygone pre-recession era of over-produced, low concept music videos, this was a great opportunity to create something fun that glorified limited resources. Embracing the childhood notion that whenever you’re not watching inanimate objects they take on a life of their own, this video is an exploration of what these civic fixtures must all be doing on the holidays when every tire shop, mechanic, and linen outlet is closed and observing.”

Below, Gluekit creates Pop Art, which examines brightly colored inanimate objects, held by hands with brightly colored fingernails, set against brightly colored backdrops, to give a saccharine sweet look at just how still a human hand can hold an object.

As stated in their artist statement:

“Concentrating on things that “pop!” in a variety of ways– our video highlights acts of presentation and interaction using a simplified vocabulary, repetition and bright colors. Aesthetically somewhere between instructional video and infomercial, this work follows our interest in clichés by employing a range of popular video tricks. We were also interested creating a “still life” that moves… ever so slightly.”

If you’ve ever been to a metal show, you’ll know that they’re funny. Simultaneously really cheesy and really hardcore, metal dudes are quite frequently just nice guys that revel in the irony of it all. You can’t constantly be wearing shirts with upside-down crosses and heavy ass phrases and mean it all of the time. (Note: We are definitely not including those from the second wave of the Nordic black metal scene in these generalizations.)

If you don’t believe my statements about metal dudes, though, perhaps these hella heavy metal quilts by Ben Venom will convince you. In his statement of work, he says:

“I’m interested in juxtaposing traditional handmade crafts with one of the more extreme musical genres, Heavy Metal. My work can be described as a collision of Iron Maiden Metal ballads with the outrageous stage antics of Ozzy Osbourne. Serious, yet attempting to take on a B movie Horror film style where even the beasts of Metal need a warm blanket to sleep with. The question remains… Can I play with madness?”

Let’s keep in mind these quilts aren’t a one-time creation with little thought put into them. Venom not only needs to craft the blankets, but he needs to attain the materials, which probably involves hours of sifting through thrift store piles to find heaps of Slayer, Def Leppard, and AC/DC discards. Then, after fighting the arduous mental battle to justify that art is greater than the sadness of the few individuals offended that he is tearing apart t-shirt classics, Venom repurposes the shirts into cozy creations. Sure, the blankets are centered around calaveras, wolves, and other stereotypically metal shit, but come on, they’re blankets. You definitely get the idea that Venom’s probably not that serious most of the time… which is just really metal of him.

Don’t Wake Me Lucifer! / 83″ x 95″ / 2010

Am I Demon? / 41” x 51” / 2010

Listen to Heavy Metal While You Sleep! / 73” x 99” / 2010

White Magic / 21” x 21” / 2010

Raised by Wolves / 19” x 19” / 2011

[ABOVE] Nieves’ logo, which looks a little bit like McDonald’s Grimace — only much more well-read…

Swiss publishing house, Nieves, really knows how to make you drool over a hard-copy art book. Their latest offering is entitled Iskandariyah Skan, and features the work of Zurich-based mixed media and installation artist, Ingo Giezendanner (whose website, it should be noted, is www.grrrr.net).

Iskandariyah, is Alexandria in Arabic, and the book documents Geizendanner’s ferry trip across the Mediterranean Sea into Alexandra, Egypt. The line art images simplistically capture Geizendanner’s surroundings, illustrating organized chaos in everything from ocean waves to trees and stacks of books to car wrecks. Geizendanner uses his eye like a camera, and later distorts the images through scanning processes (see artist statement below for details).

Below, a few pages of samples from the 192-page, soft cover, offset-printed book!! YUM!

More images on Nieves’ website.

Of the product, Geizendanner says:

“My previous picture book was about a train trip to Baku, this book documents my ferry trip accross the Mediterranean Sea to Alexandria (or Iskandariyah as it is called in Arabic). I was invited to exhbit my work and conduct a workshop organized by the artist-run Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF). This paperback is a selection of the many drawings that transpired on this amazing journey.

Not all my drawings are of a scene that catches my eye. Often it starts with coming across a really comfortable spot where I can sit undisturbed for some time amongst the hustle and rumble of a busy city. This, for me, can be quite meditative. Later, I scan the drawings to upload onto my website and other applications.

This time round, I also experimented with the drawings and hope to present this book as my personal development or work in progress. I wish to share the overwhelming experience of drawing the ocean and have tried to capture the simultaneous static second and fluid element of the water by flushing the drawings through a scanner and allowing them to distort as they wish to flow, much like the city, much like life itself.”

If you are for some reason in Zurich this weekend, there is a book launch and signing taking place at Nieves (Ankerstrasse 20, 8004, Zurich) on Saturday, July 2nd, from 14:00 to 17:00.

“It’s always exciting to enter new territory, having no idea what might happen.”

The SF Moma blog has taken to publishing a series of Positive Signs, which is described as, “a weekly series of interpretive diagrams, quotes, and speculations on creativity, optimism*, and the lives of artists, published every Wednesday through June. (*Notwithstanding brief forays into the nature of space, stuff, experience, and cognition.)”

Original post here.

#25, #26, and #27, created by Christine Wong Yap with glitter pen on gridded vellum, utilizes careful precision with a finicky medium on a finicky material (trust me; glitter pens are indeed finicky, as is vellum!) to create pieces that are refreshingly big picture. These images speak abstractly about “universal truths,” giving equal weight to feeling and thought in literary and graphical manners. The quotes are from the book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by Yi-Fu Tuan… which apparently I need to read, with immediacy.